Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdmoreira | Hacker News Reader

I wish I could go back to the days where our group would spend all our free time playing split screen GoldenEye at my friend's basement. If you were privileged enough (which we were) the 90s were a great time to be a child.

View on HN

Goldeneye and Donkey Kong 64 split-screen were pretty much the go-to games for my friend group back in middle and high school (late '90s/early 2000s).

They stuck around even well after better consoles and games came along-- most of us ended up going down the Sony side of the PS2/Xbox/GC generation, which was limited to two players without a multitap. The N64's four controller ports were really a killer feature for the system-- it meant that the only thing you needed for four-way multiplayer was to have each player bring along their controllers from home.

We did GoldenEye and Mario Kart 64. And when things got wild, Super Mario Kart would come out.

My son still gets together with his friends. They will bring over their PS4 and connect to his computer monitor in his room and they will play with each other “online” sitting right by each other.

At one point, he’s had four friends over all with PS4s playing against each other on separate displays in the house - thank goodness for wired gigabit Ethernet through the house and a bidirectional gig-e Internet connection that didn’t even blink at the traffic. My wife and I were still able to watch DirecTVNow....

Back in the day, they would have to drag desktop computers, CRT monitors and known how to network them for LAN parties.

My midtower case has a big handle on the top of it. Its from that era! Don't see many of those anymore.

Just need to know where to shop:

http://www.lian-li.com/pc-tu100/

The latter was basically my thing in the neighborhood for a time. Started out with BNC connected coax and then upgraded the kit to TP and hubs/switches. Crazy thing is that i had perhaps the shittiest internet connection around...

It’s kind of amazing that they can get better networking performance today over the internet than we could get on the typical local lan back then.

I remember in those days we used to ban playing oddjob because he had a shortness advantage

Haha, I think the "Oddjob ban" was pretty much universal ;)

In my group whoever's system we were playing on got to be oddjob, after all they were providing the snacks.

I never understood the "Oddjob handicap." The game would auto-aim at anything in the center 1/3 of the screen.

It still auto aims at him, but it attempts to aim at the same angle necessary for a full size character so your bullets go over his head.

having friends, access to a basement and enough cash to purchase Goldeneye, or a friend with the cash, sets a very low bar for the term "privileged".

'Privileged' is very much a matter of what you're comparing against. In the 90's, about 25% of the world's population didn't have electricity [0], let alone game consoles.

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/eg.elc.accs.zs

I grew up in Portugal and in a poor region. We were very privileged compared to our peers.

Places like Brazil have obscene taxes on game hardware so if you could afford a copy of Goldeneye with early-2000s money, you were a baller.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com